Mike Pence has a whole new Trump-Russia problem

| 4:21 pm EST February 19, 2018
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Mike Pence seems to think that if he lays low and acts vaguely “presidential” while the Trump-Russia scandal plays out, he’ll get to inherit the presidency once Donald Trump is ousted. The trouble for him is that he’s knee deep in the Trump-Russia coverup. He’s been caught lying, obstructing justice, you name it. Now he has a whole new reason to be worried about the scandal.

Yesterday, former Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates revealed that he’s pleading guilty this week on Russia-related crimes. Gates probably doesn’t have any dirt on Mike Pence. Gates may not even have any dirt on Donald Trump. But that doesn’t matter, because Gates has all on his longtime business partner, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. This should force Manafort to cut a deal of his own, and give up all the dirt he has. As it turns out, Pence has a Manafort problem.

We know that Manafort was acting as a financially indebted puppet of the Kremlin the entire time he was running the Trump campaign. It’s also long been widely reported that it was Manafort who all but forced Trump to choose Pence as his running mate, when Trump preferred Chris Christie. At the time, Pence had such a low approval rating as Governor of Indiana that he couldn’t have run for reelection, despite being in a red state.

So did Paul Manafort force Donald Trump to choose the unappealing Mike Pence as his running mate because he saw something in the demographic polling that no one else did, or did the order come from the Kremlin? Why would Russia want Mike Pence on the ticket? What did Pence know and when did he know it? Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to find out, because Manafort is going to end up having to spill everything to get a deal.